Sunday, July 26, 2015

Time to excommunicate J Street

Every organization that claims to be Jewish is lining up against the Iran nuclear sellout. Everyone except one: Pro-Obama, pro-Iran, anti-Israel J Street. Charles Jacobs and Elliott Hamilton argue that it's time to kick J Street out of the Jewish communal tent. In fact, it's long past time.

But the J Street lobby has broken ranks with that sentiment. Back when the deal’s framework was reached in early April, J Street co-authored a statement with the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) and the Arab American Institute,
welcoming the agreement. Now that the details have become known and
almost every major Jewish organization is trying to kill the deal, J
Street is undertaking a multi-million dollar campaign
to get Jews to support an arrangement that at best keeps Iran nuke-free
for about a decade while it gives the mullahs $150 billion to arm
Israel’s enemies. This puts J Street in direct confrontation with the
more than 80 percent of the Jews of Israel, whose political parties from
left to right are fiercely united against President Barack Obama’s
deal.

J Street’s campaigning for the Iran deal comes as no
surprise to those who have been carefully watching the organization
since its inception in 2008. J Street’s policy on Iran has never been
aligned with the rest of the American Jewish community. In Americans for
Peace and Tolerance’s film “The J Street Challenge,” Professor Alan
Dershowitz complains that: “It’s impossible to know what J Street’s
position on Iran is. I actually offered to contribute money to J Street
if they would answer a series of specific questions about their
positions on Iran, and I couldn’t get an answer to any of those
questions.”

J Street has a history of taking significant sums of
money from anti-Israel sources—and lying about it. For example, J Street
continuously lied about its funding from George Soros, who has blamed
Israel and the Jewish people for the rise of global anti-Semitism. While
J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami kept denying it, Eli Lake reported in
2010 that J Street acquired $750,000 from Soros’s family. Ben-Ami was
eventually forced to apologize for lying.

Even more troubling was
the discovery that Genevieve Lynch, a board member of the NIAC, also
funded J Street. NIAC is no ally of the Jewish community, and has
recently created a 501(c)4 to counter pro-Israel groups’ attempts to
halt the Iran deal.

In 2012, J Street spent $100,000 trying to
convince lawmakers on Capitol Hill to both ease the rhetoric against
Iran and to alter the status of the Palestinian Diplomatic Mission to
the U.S.
J Street has also received funding from the Ploughshares
Fund, Inc., a global security foundation that supports a “peaceful
world, including on free of nuclear weapons.” This same organization
spent millions of dollars pushing for Chuck Hagel’s nomination for
Secretary of Defense and lobbying to lift sanctions off Iran. According
to the Ploughshares Fund’s Form 990 in 2012, J Street acquired $25,000
“to support efforts to educate members of Congress on the consequences
that preemptive use of military force against Iran’s nuclear program may
have on Israel.” In its Form 990s in both 2013 and 2014, it shows that
Ploughshares gave J Street a total of $275,000 “to use a pro-Israel
frame to educate members of Congress on the dangers that a military
confrontation with Iran could have for both Israel and the U.S., and to
promote political solutions to the nuclear impasse.”

Why would a
seemingly pro-Israel organization acquire funds from pro-Iran sources to
promote a pro-Iran agenda to the United States Congress? One reason
seems clear: J Street’s usefulness to Israel’s adversaries is its
“pro-Israel frame,” and that can be successfully monetized.

1 Comments:

J Street is a front organization of leftist Democrats and enemies of Israel who don't actually support Israel. In the mode of old Communist Party front organizations such as the "Committee for Peace and Freedom," they attempt to get the support of pro-Israel naifs by claiming to be both pro-Israel and pro-peace. It is difficult me to understand how any pro-Israel organization can make common cause with NIAC, which is clearly an Iranian-government supported lobby except, of course, that J-Street is neither pro-peace nor pro-Israel.

Links to this post:

About Me

I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com